UCyborg wrote:Yes, it is. Or why else would there be DirectSound3D Software providers available in the old versions of Miles Sound System?...Selecting any of these result in successful initialization on XP:

1. Yes, I was not precise enough. So more precisely: There is no emulated DirectSound3D on XP that gives you proper 3D positional audio contrary to Win Vista+. I have just tested on an 5.1 setup and none of the Directsound3D emulation modes on XP gives 3d positional audio, while on Win 7/10 Directsound3D software emulation gives proper 3d positional audio.And this is the point I wanted to say: without hardware acceleration you cannot get proper 3d positional audio on XP, but on later Windows versions you can.

Thanks for clarifying! So even though it actually does something, it gives incorrect results. And kills the performance.

Anyone knows how DOOM 3's DirectSound renderer performs on XP? I know you must have 5.1 option selected in Windows sound settings in order for it to work right if you pick Surround option in game's sound settings and that way it does work as expected on Vista+. I'd have to check to be sure, but going from my memory, this one doesn't use DirectSound3D at all, right? But there's an option to use OpenAL where 3D positioning works similarly as in DirectSound3D games plus its OpenAL renderer can use EAX 4.0.

bakcom wrote:Should there be an inherent reason why (at least with a specific game and on XP), more than stereo wouldn't work when audio "hardware acceleration" is disabled in Windows?

The posts in response to your question have already covered everything, but if you're curious to try it out for yourself you can use this simple little program that I wrote (also mentioned earlier in this thread):

That demonstrates how DirectSound3D behaves with software buffers, which is exactly what will happen when you disable hardware acceleration. As Falcosoft and UCyborg explained you won't hear any surround speakers being utilized when the program is run in XP.

I have been working on rewriting a substantial portion of IndirectSound to use Windows Core Audio rather than XAudio2, and while doing so I have moved from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2017. (I originally used 2010 because that was when the last version of the DirectX SDK was released and I figured that anyone who could use DirectSound would be able to use a wrapper DLL made with VS2010 for sure without any additional work. This is no longer true since DirectX has been made part of Windows, and using VS2017 is nice because of the compiler/optimizer improvements since 2010 as well as allowing me to use modern C++ features.)

I am posting here to solicit some help testing. To try and be clear , this current version DOESN'T EMULATE ANYTHING! (I don't want anyone to get their hopes up that I'm asking for help testing EAX (yet... ).) At the moment it is a fancy but useless wrapper that merely passes on all calls from games straight to DirectSound (lol). The testing I am interested in has nothing to do with audio behavior; rather, I am interested in verifying that the DLL still works properly with the changes I've made on systems other than mine and that I am correctly detecting audio hardware on systems other than mine. IndirectSound doesn't have its own forums, and I thought VOGONS readers would have a good chance of being interested/willing in trying something and also having a wide variety of Windowses and hardware.

(It is enough to just start up the game and then exit as soon as a single sound is played; everything that I am interested in happens at initialization)

I am hoping to learn the following:

Does it work on all Windows versions since Vista SP1?

By "work" I mean does the game run without crashing and without Windows showing any error messages

(I currently only have my most recent Windows 10 machine and my old Windows XP machine to test with; it would be nice to confirm that I'm not doing anything that would only work on the latest-and-"greatest" Windows)

Of particular interest to me is if your audio device uses Dolby Digital (or similar compression). In that case I would very much like to know both what is reported on the "Audio stream initialized" line and in the "The application initialized a new audio endpoint device" section.

You can feel free to email me directly at indirectsound@gmail.com with any results (or post your findings here if you discover anything that would be interesting to the general public). If you email me I would be appreciative if you would attach the generated dsound.log file.